Slanted Science

It has been known for thousands of years that babies cry. They wail, they shriek, they whine.

Rather more recently, we’ve begun to understand that they cry in different ways when certain things are troubling them: hunger, tiredness, loneliness, that strange man with big hands who keeps thrusting a bunch of shiny things in its face and jangling them.

But now, scientists are claiming that they can distinguish the national origin of a baby from the intonation of its cries.

The research is published in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology, and is the brainbaby (hehe) of researchers at Würzburg University in Germany, led by Kathleen Wermke. Other authors’ affiliations are listed here.

The scientists followed babies from two nationalities during their early days, armed with microphones and notebooks. They found some startling differences in the newborns’ crying.

So, what is going on here? Well, Wermke and colleagues have shown that French babies cry in tonal patterns different from those of German babies. Furthermore, these tonal differences are aligned with those of their parents’ native language. A description of what the authors mean is given by Angela Friederici:

In French, there are a great many words where the stress lies towards the end, producing a rising melody, while in German it is usually the other way round.

It’s true! Go ahead and try it: speak nonsense with the most stereotypically German, and then French, accents you can muster.

Now have a look around you, and apologize to all the people giving you nervous glances.

But seriously, the authors found that the babies’ cries replicated these differences in language intonations. It is well established that babies of only a few months of age produce cries with requirement-dependent melodies, but these guys show that newborns – previously believed to show only respiration-dependent crying patterns – actully make sounds specific to their parents’ accents.

So, how long until someone writes the punchline to this joke: an Irish baby, a Scottish baby and an English baby are put into the same stroller…

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: SlantedScience loves language sciences. We’re convinced that there will come a day when we can have meaningful contact with babies, monkeys, birds, and beyond. We’re serious. Mock now, apologize in the future…